Website builders offer a simple solution for non-designers to create a website. Wix is difficult to beat due to its low pricing and simple interface. Squarespace, on the other hand, comes in a close second with its drag-and-drop blocks that allow you to create a professional-looking website in minutes.
Our comparison guide outlines the benefits and drawbacks of each to help you find the best website builder for your site.
Squarespace vs Wix
Wix is the best website builder for the majority of users. With a few clicks, you can rearrange elements on your website to create a page that looks exactly like the one you imagined. There is no coding required, making it an excellent choice for almost any individual or business in need of a visually appealing website at an affordable price. If you’re not satisfied with Wix after 14 days, you can get your money back.
Squarespace will almost certainly assist creatives with their websites. Squarespace includes a plethora of visually appealing premade templates, making it an excellent choice for photographers, artists, and other creators. Squarespace also provides a solid option for writers with built-in blogging tools. Use the 14-day free trial to give it a shot.
Highlights from Squarespace
Squarespace is the way to go if you’re an artist, musician, designer, photographer, or another type of creative who relies heavily on visuals to sell your work.
Its templates and overall design aesthetic are ideal for image and video-heavy businesses looking for unique and creative ways to present their portfolios.
Squarespace is an all-in-one website builder that comes with everything you need, whether you’re looking for a place to display your work or an easy way to sell it.
Getting started is also as simple as it gets. Because all you have to do is select a template, customise it with a drag-and-drop builder, and hit the publish button.
Highlights from Wix
Wix is the way to go if you want to build your next website quickly and affordably. You can choose from over 700 pre-made templates or use Wix’s ADI tool to build your website automatically in minutes.
Its drag-and-drop interface is user-friendly for everyone, including complete beginners. You can also create any type of website, such as an online store, a blog, or a business website. And Wix’s proactive monitoring and work on the security and optimization of their infrastructure means a pain-free experience once your site goes live.
Pros and Cons: Squarespace vs Wix
We have a thorough understanding of the industry of web hosting service providers. We are constantly researching these companies, looking for both the positive and negative aspects that they provide. We were able to identify a number of areas where Squarespace and Wix excel, as well as a number of areas where they fall short.
Pros of Squarespace:
- Content management: Because of its numerous writing-friendly features, Squarespace is one of the best website builders for blogging and content management. If you’ve used WordPress before, you’ll notice many similarities in Squarespace’s blog editor, such as post scheduling, categories, and customizable URLs. Squarespace also allows you to syndicate your posts to your social media channels, invite contributors, and create multiple blogs for a single site.
- For mobile apps: Squarespace does not bind its customers to their computers or laptops when it comes to managing their websites. Squarespace, on the other hand, provides mobile apps. There are several options, including the general Squarespace app, which allows you to quickly update pages, write new blog posts, and make other site changes while on the go. Commerce can also be used to manage your Squarespace store, and Analytics can be used to learn more about your website traffic.
- Ease of use: Almost anyone can quickly and painlessly create a Squarespace website. Squarespace has a structured editor with plenty of customization options, allowing you to create a site that looks exactly how you imagined it without having to go through lengthy processes or learn to code the backend.
- Templates: Squarespace templates are among the most beautiful and professional that a website builder has to offer. They’re all pre-made and ready to use, and you can tweak them to your heart’s content to achieve the exact look and feel you want. The templates require no coding knowledge, but they appear to be coded by a professional designer. There are currently over 100 templates available.
- Analytics: Squarespace’s analytics provide a comprehensive view of your website’s traffic, visitor demographics, visitor activity, and SEO. All of this information is available in the Squarespace dashboard for viewing at any time, or you can use the Analytics app on your mobile device.
- Image selection: Squarespace, as a complete website solution, includes stock images and fonts that you can use to customise the look of your site. With all plans, the platform includes 600 Google fonts and 1,000 Adobe fonts. Squarespace collaborates with Unsplash to allow free use of their images on your site, and it also provides low-cost access to Getty images.
Areas of Squarespace need to be improved(Cons):
- Expensive ecommerce plans: If you have an ecommerce site, you must either purchase one of Squarespace’s ecommerce plans or pay a 3% fee for each shop transaction. At first glance, $35/month for the basic plan appears reasonable, but it lacks essential features for many shops, such as shipping calculations and abandoned cart recovery. The cost for these is $54 per month, which is double the cost of Wix’s most basic ecommerce plan, which includes these features.
- Heavy templates: While Squarespace templates are great for transforming photos and artwork into visually stunning websites, many of them are image-heavy. This is great for the visual appeal of your site, but not so great for loading times. So, even if you find a theme you like, you may not be able to use it to its full potential without sacrificing some speed.
- Clumsy backup procedure: Unlike other website builders, there is no easy way to backup a Squarespace site. There are also no automatic backups. Backing up a site necessitates site owners downloading their data via an XML file, which does not allow them to download the entire site because product pages, draughts, and other components are not included in an XML. Furthermore, beginners are unlikely to know what to do with that file if they ever need to restore site data.
- Website navigation: When it comes to website navigation, organisation is everything. Squarespace has a two-level menu system, which means you can have a drop-down sub-menu following your primary menu. However, the hierarchy ends there. If you have a larger site that requires a more complex navigation system, Squarespace may be unable to meet your requirements.
Pros of Wix:
- Customization: Wix is one of the most adaptable website builders available. Because of its unstructured editing tool, you can literally place elements exactly where you want them on your site, giving you complete control over the finished product. Because no code is required, Wix is an excellent choice for beginners or anyone who simply does not want to mess with coding.
- Simple setup: Not sure what kind of design you require for the site you’re attempting to build? Wix ADI selects the best configuration for you. Answer a few questions about your site’s goals, and Wix’s artificial intelligence will create the ideal layout and design for you. Of course, you can customise it from there, but the initial setup couldn’t be simpler.
- Affordable: Wix provides a completely free plan that is not merely a trial. Begin with this plan and stick with it for as long as you want to test out Wix’s features and capabilities. You’ll almost certainly need to upgrade to a paid plan at some point, as the free one places Wix advertising on your site with a less-than-desirable Wix subdomain URL. Paid plans, on the other hand, start at just $13/month for personal use and $23/month for business use, which is relatively inexpensive when compared to other website builders and hosting plans.
- SEO: Wix didn’t have the best built-in SEO features in the beginning, but it now includes basic and advanced SEO features like clean URLs, meta descriptions, canonical URLs, robots.txt files, and instant indexing with Google. Wix even provides users with a personal SEO plan that walks them through the process of setting up a site through Google Search Console in order to improve search engine visibility and rankings.
- App option: The Wix App Market contains over 250 apps that add functionality to your site, similar to WordPress plugins and Squarespace integrations. The App Market is simple to use, with everything from marketing and selling tools to navigation and design elements available.
- Excellent security: Wix adheres to the highest industry security standards for all data, from your site’s own to visitor payments. This is supplemented by a team of Wix experts whose sole responsibility it is to monitor and optimise the infrastructure, as well as dedicated teams ready to assist if your site is subjected to a direct cyberattack.
- Auto backups: By logging into your Content Manager dashboard and clicking a button, you can create a manual backup of your site at any time. However, every week, Wix performs an auto-backup of any site that has changed since the last backup, providing website owners with the peace of mind that their site is safe on the internet.
- Excellent uptime: In addition to these two types of backups, Wix continuously monitors and optimises their infrastructure to ensure that all Wix sites are accessible to visitors at all times. Maintenance is performed in such a way that your site is never down. Furthermore, the combined power of AWS, Google Cloud, and Fastly data centres (along with Wix’s own) and the autoscaling built into Wix plans will result in no site-loading hiccups for your visitors, no matter how many are visiting at once.
Areas of Wix needs to be improved(cons):
- Mobile page speed: Simply put, if you have a website in today’s digital world, it must be mobile responsive. Wix mobile sites lag behind other website builders in terms of responsiveness and speed. In a comprehensive study of more than 5 million desktop and mobile websites conducted by Backlinko, Wix was ranked among the slowest hosting providers in terms of mobile speeds.
- Customer support: Wix’s contact options are limited, especially if you aren’t yet a customer. When you go to the contact page, there is no phone number, live chat, or email address to contact with questions. Once you have an account, you can use the ticketing system to get answers to questions that aren’t already answered in the Help Center, but there’s no option for other forms of support, such as live chat, which could help you solve your problems faster.
- Limited storage space: With today’s HD photos and videos, having plenty of storage space with a hosting plan is essential. There are several paid Wix plans to choose from, but each one has a storage limit. The most is available with the Business VIP plan, which costs $49 per month and includes 50 GB of storage. In comparison, Squarespace provides unlimited storage on all of its plans, including the $12/month Personal plan.
- Design: One of Wix’s most notable and well-liked features is also one of its drawbacks: its unstructured drag-and-drop builder. While this type of editing is great for people who have some experience with website design, it can be difficult for complete beginners. Because the format is open-ended, anything can happen. If you’ve ever designed a website, you know how a minor change can drastically alter its appearance and functionality—and how difficult it can be to restore it.
Bottom Line
Both Squarespace and Wix are excellent options for creating a website. These two are convenient and user-friendly enough for virtually anyone to use to create websites, thanks to their pre-made templates and drag-and-drop editing. The truth is that either choice would be a good one.
Wix is the superior choice if cost is your primary consideration. As a starting point, it offers a free plan, and even its most basic paid plan has a number of premium enhancements that are unavailable in the free version of Squarespace.
Squarespace is the best option if you plan to blog frequently and your site needs to load quickly on mobile devices. When compared to other website builders like Squarespace, Wix falls short in terms of mobile speed and cannot compete with its powerful content management system.
Wix, on the other hand, is the best option because of its adaptable pricing and easy-to-use interface. Wix makes it easier than ever to get the site you want by providing more than 700 premade templates that can be customised to your liking.